This discussion with Steven and Mark covers some big-picture astrological subjects from the evolutionary framework, including the importance of houses, the counseling dynamic in a reading, and fate vs. free will. Listen to the original conversation on YouTube.
Tony Howard: So, I’m here at NORWAC 2011 with Mark Jones and Steven Forrest, very lucky to have them together in one room. So guys, let’s talk about a question that I’ve always been perplexed by.
In a lot of evolutionary astrology books—and not just evolutionary astrology books, but in a lot of astrology books in general—you often see the planet, sign, and house equated as one archetypal complex. And yet we know from experience looking at a chart that those archetypes are expressed differently through the vehicle of a planet or the sign or a house. So I was hoping to get you guys to talk about that and express your points of view.
Steven Forrest: Certainly, planets rule signs and houses, so implicit in that simple, basic astrological notion is that there is an archetypal connection between, say, Mercury, Gemini, and the third house, for example, but I do think that it adds a lot of unnecessary fuzz to astrological thinking to blur them entirely.
With my students, there’s a line I just harp on all the time, and it’s kind of a bumper sticker line: we are our signs and we do our houses. Houses tend to be active and biographical, and signs tend to be more energetic.
Let me give you an illustration of this. I would like to describe a person as tremendously oriented to her career. She works six and a half days a week, twelve hours a day. Here’s the astrological question: is she an introvert or an extrovert?
We see how the mind immediately boggles. We can’t answer that.
“Is she an introvert or an extrovert?” is a question that would be pertinent to the signs, the actual energetic texture of her character, the structure of her biographical life as I just described it. Working would suggest to me a strong 10th house, perhaps, or maybe a strong 6th house in her chart because this is the action of her life, but we might find an introvert who lived that way or an extrovert who lived that way.
To describe someone as an introvert, I might want to see something like Cancer rising. I wouldn’t so much relate introversion to the structure of houses. Somebody might think if somebody has a great concentration in the 4th house, that will be an introverted kind of person, and I think the odds kind of lean in that direction, but if a person has seven planets in Sagittarius in the 4th house, I’d be quite surprised if they manifested in an introverted way. The energetic texture of the character would tend to be more reflective of that fiery archetype.
Mark Jones: I will own some thoughtfulness of the question because I do find it useful to archetypally compare, say, a 2nd house Saturn with Capricorn on the 2nd house cusp, or Saturn with Venus. I think they have an archetypal correspondence.
But take a planet like Pluto. If I start by looking at Pluto, then I’m going to be interested in the house. I guess I am centralizing a planet as a starting point, to go with Steven’s demarcation. At least to that degree, I’m starting with a planet.
And then I’m thinking: the planet’s in a house, which is probably more personal to that individual because a planet like Pluto is a generational signature. Pluto is going to be in Virgo and Libra for a lot of people.
The fact that it’s in the 7th or the 9th house is more specific to that person, even though the generational context is important. You could argue people are born together at a certain time for a series of karmic reasons or propensities deep down inside them, that would evolve through that collective impulse. But I would look at the house of that particular planet to specify it more because practically it’s more unique to the person.
I also find planets interesting like that because if a planet is in Libra and the 9th house, but it rules the 10th House Scorpio, by rulership dynamics, you can extend the chart out from one point.
So if someone had eight planets in the 4th house or something, then through rulership, you can find all the rest of the chart. It’s all there for you. You can just have a starting point and use it, such as rulerships. All those planets rule different houses, and therefore, express themselves through the chart in a certain kind of way. So, I don’t have a simple teaching thing for signs and houses.
I think it’s interesting what Steven’s saying. I never actually thought of it like that before. I will have a think.
I think there is some archetypal comparison, but I think it becomes denoted through degrees of importance. So Pluto in Libra in the 10th house is not necessarily of the same degree of importance as Venus in Capricorn in the 8th house, the same combination of the archetypes—but it could be if Venus was the north node ruler, or the south node ruler, or in some other kind of aspect within the chart.
So, it’s a series of questions to me about how they archetypally combine. I’m interested in how the archetypes combine.
And I prioritize. To prioritize, I do use the distinction between planets and signs and houses, so they’re not just all the same, but they have an archetypal similarity or resonance to them. That then becomes unique through the pattern of the individual’s chart. So, I try to orientate Pluto, the nodes in importance like that, then follow out from there.
I guess I’m prioritizing planets. Although, I’m prioritizing them in their signs and houses. So, it’s almost unavoidable, isn’t it? To take on all three the whole time? So, I see an archetypal resonance. I would definitely consider this idea of doing the houses as an act of expression. I think that’s interesting.
To me, the most important thing is to get the series of central archetypes and then see how they combine. So if you have Pluto in Libra and the 10th or Venus in Capricorn and the 8th, you’re juggling with those archetypal forms. You’re making a dish out of those ingredients, but the first dish is a Pluto dish, and it’s of that order of that importance. The second dish is the Venus dish. It’s important, depending on other factors in the chart, so they combine but at different levels in different ways.
Tony Howard: Would you tend to—either of you can answer this—would you tend to place more precedence on the planet, sign, or the house when you’re combining the archetypes in a reading?
Steven Forrest: The planet, absolutely.
Mark Jones: I think I have to agree with that. You just start by eye.
Even if you would say archetypally that the house became more important in the reading or whatever, you start with the planet. I start with Pluto. It helps you key in. You’ve got to start somewhere, haven’t you? I think the sensible place to start is probably planets or nodes. For me, you can’t go too far wrong, because you’ll have an ultimate context to look at all the other placements like a Venus in Capricorn or whatever.
Tony Howard: That brings up an interesting question because we know that, Mark, the way you practice astrology, you start with Pluto first. Then you look at the nodes then you go back to Pluto. You often teach to be really rigorous about that.
Steven, you start with the south node, and you’ll bring in Pluto if it’s in the context of the story, but you don’t necessarily hinge the reading on Pluto. So can you explain, I don’t know that there’s a real difference or a clash of that perspective, but could you explain what your intention is, in doing that?
Mark Jones: I mean, my intention—let’s just start with me. The south node is the past. If you can contextualize a person’s past, then you can help them with the present and where they might be going.
The Pluto level of the past is the more unconscious dynamic to me. I start there because it’s an unconscious context like the deepest security factor, whereas the south node is the more overt story like you were saying, Steven. To me, Pluto is the context of where a soulful aspect or a deeper unconscious aspect of the person has been fixated, and then the south node is the specific dynamic. So, to me, they just play off each other.
Steven Forrest:
That feels right. I had a conversation with Jeffrey Wolf Green in the early days of our working together towards writing the Measuring the Night books or the seminars that manifested as those books. And there’s always been exactly the same philosophical DNA, essentially, between Jeffrey’s work and mine, but our techniques have tended to be quite different.
As we were discussing the possibility of teaching together, we were having frank discussions as the Israelis and the Palestinians are wont to do about some of our differences. It was actually warm and wonderful when we were doing it, but in his system and the Pluto School branch of evolutionary astrology, Pluto represents the soul.
In my system of astrology, that’s not true. The soul is a mystery that is derivative of all the information in the chart and transcends it all. I wouldn’t narrow it down to Pluto.
Mark Jones:
Yeah, that’s a really profound point. I mean, the true spiritual essence of a human being transcends or permeates the entire chart. It’s not just located in one thing and one aspect. That’s why to me, I distinguish Pluto as the deepest, unconscious security factor, the deepest inner first fixation. I think that’s a really quite moving point Steven just made actually. The spiritual essence of a human being transcends the birth chart, full stop.
Steven Forrest:
Yes, yes, period. When Jeff and I were having this discussion, I sensed that there was—as between Mark and I here—a fundamental unity at the feeling level of perception, like there isn’t really disagreement, but in finding the words, we were running into what appeared to be disagreement.
Where Jeff and I went—and this is a moment I’ll always remember—in essence, he was saying Pluto is the soul. In essence, I was saying, no, Pluto is the wound in the soul. And then Jeff said—and this was the memorable moment for me—under the patriarchy, all souls are wounded.
In that instant, we saw where the bridge could exist between our two very different kinds of work and, with the south node of the moon, you’re really not looking at a person’s karma across the board. You’re looking at their unresolved karma, the karma that has ripened in this lifetime, to use the Buddhist language, what they have to deal with in this lifetime. To see all your karma would paint the chart black.
Mark Jones:
You wouldn’t be able to bear it, necessarily, not all in one go.
Steven Forrest:
Absolutely, there’d be no use for that, either, because it would just be too much, and it would be beyond the scope of what we could handle. So there is a certain woundedness implicit in the south node and Pluto to me.
My system gives the skills and the powers and the tools that we need to access the wound, and that process is so soulful, and so pertinent to the actual journey of the soul, that to equate it with the soul actually was something I felt pretty comfortable with. It’s like that process is the process that makes us soulful. With that, it all came together comfortably.
Tony Howard:
And, Steven, I also like what you say about the moon. Knowing you talk about differentiating the soulfulness of the moon in that quality, if you could bring some of that out?
Steven Forrest:
It’s a rather similar semantic issue that Jeff and I stumbled on a little bit. I simply call the moon the soul.
Jeff didn’t actually have a disagreement with me there. That wasn’t the feeling I had. He said, though, that language would confuse his students because, when he was saying soul, he was referring to Pluto, primarily, and using the term soul quite rigorously, as a kind of a theological concept, a reincarnating principle of consciousness and so on.
When I speak of the moon as the soul, my intent is really very different. It’s much more in the street sense of the word soul. Like, I’m feeling soulful, you’ve got soul. I have a soul connection with Mark, you know, even though he thinks Pluto is the soul.
Mark Jones:
No, I get that. I think that’s quite true. Having taken Jeffrey’s work and kind of run with it, the moon is the personality in this life. It’s the color of the person in this life. Now we call that technically the ego because, in looking at the south node, we’re looking at past life egos, but the ego is a very subtle and complex thing. Everyone views life through their ego.
This really is the person. It’s the personhood. I totally agree with that, and I think the interesting angle on Pluto is a different level altogether. It’s a much deeper unconscious level. You know, Jeffrey also said, it’s very hard to be conscious of your own soul.
Now, we get also into Christian language and you’ve raised the Buddhist point of view. I mean, the Buddhists don’t see a soul in that sense at all. They see a recurring mind stream, and I would see the transpersonal planets generally as embodying aspects of that mind stream, in particular Pluto and Uranus. Uranus, these long-term memories, including traumatic memories, and Pluto, the emotional core energy of this long-term mindstream. So, we’re talking about a really subtle level of mind.
In the more day-to-day sense, ego or selfhood is people’s day to day experience, and I really liked that street sense of soul because that’s just what you are.
These other levels accord to more subtle principles or dynamics or evolution, possibly—the clearest idea to me is the Buddhist idea of the mind stream. There is no single entity like a soul that just recurs time and time again. It’s this subtle flow that comes with you, the parts that remain in your mind stream in your higher mind.
And the other thing is past lives, right? I mean, I raised the question: Are our past lives truly past?
If an aspect of this mind stream or our essence is outside of space and time, and then these lives aren’t past anyway, are they all continuous? We’re having our past lives right now if the soul is outside of space and time, or this quality of our spirit is outside of space and time, and looking back at us.
So there are no simple ideas here. There’s no simple linearity, I don’t think.
You’re just talking about how to access a chart with depth, how to get to someone’s heart, how to get to someone’s core, how to offer assistance to them, or actually resonate with them on a deep level. And then, it’s important that different teachings have different forms and that they respect each other.
But yet semantics—whether it’s Pluto soul or the wound of the soul—becomes a very subtle and actually rather beautiful discussion or argument. It’s a shame if the two forms miss each other. It’s actually a really quite subtle level of dialogue, it seems to me.
Steven Forrest:
Yes, yes, and with both statements made we have a deeper truth on the table than if we had either one of them alone.
Tony Howard:
Yeah, and just standing there and going, “No, it’s this in a literal way?” There is no literal. There is no literal soul or literal ego or literal self or literal person in the static sense.
And certainly the chart—and this is something else I stand up for time and time again—the chart should not define people or hem them into a box. It should be a doorway or a portal. People’s true nature is not in this strange set of squiggles on a piece of paper. It’s too reductive for me. It’s a tool to be open to who they are. It’s coming from them really, or life is coming through that, and this is just a symbolic set of correspondences.
If we are open-hearted and open-minded, we can look at it to help facilitate them becoming who they really are, which is the only real goal, maybe, I don’t know.
Steven Forrest:
Yeah, absolutely right. You used the word “nature” a moment ago, and I love the spirit of what you’re saying, but in the spirit of us bothering each other to get deeper and deeper.
First, very generally, go among any group of astrologers and put forth the assertion that you can see a person’s nature in the chart, that’s one thing almost every astrologer would agree with, yet I like to disagree with it.
A client comes in and sits with me, and I like to say to them, “This chart that I have, that represents you. You’ve had this chart ever since the day you were born.”
I’ve never gotten any argument about that, and then I bring up the idea of, “I speak of your nature, when you were five years old.” And then I compliment the person, “I suspect you have improved.” Which is true for most of the people who find their way to my door—the same chart, but a rather distinctly different nature.
A shy kid will 90% of the time grow into an introverted adult. There are certain constants in human nature, but far more interesting is the end of the equation where people are constantly transforming themselves.
Tony Howard:
They really are, aren’t they? And they really do.
There is an infinite potentiality in that symbolism. It doesn’t even have to be a person, does it? That piece of paper, that chart could be the time a daisy opened its flowers to the sun, the time a dolphin leapt out of the water at that particular spot. It doesn’t even necessarily indicate a human being.
It’s the consciousness the individual brings to the reading or brings to the time of looking at their chart that is, to me, always elevated beyond the chart. You look at the chart in service of the deeper self of the individual whose chart it is.
The magical idea that you can be a magician and tell someone who they are just by looking at this piece of paper and fix them with that definition. I have a problem with that. I will stand against that.
I will argue for a counseling dynamic like you’re talking about, like a living, co-creative exchange with the human being, and that the human being’s value is always here, and the chart is in service here, and, therefore, any of our conceptualizations about what astrology means have to be held here.
They’re not more important than the person or the life that moves through that person, so, in that sense, all our arguments as astrologers, and all these great conferences, don’t amount to the greatest hill of beans on one level, do they? It doesn’t stop the sun shining. It should lead to that greater openness to me. It’s in that spirit that dialogue is already interesting and profound.
Now, I found myself quite engaged here talking now. I wasn’t sure what I was getting into, but it’s just gotten to the level that I like, to talk about charts with you.
Tony Howard:
So, we’ve already had some talk at the conference about astrology’s place in the world. And I think about that experience that we’ve all had as astrologers, where a person hasn’t come to a reading.
They meet us at a party and we say, “I’m an astrologer.” And they say, “I don’t believe in astrology.” And I think about: what is astrology’s rightful place in our culture? Is it like a religion? Is it a belief system? Can you believe in astrology? Or is it more like a science? Is it something you can prove? Or is it magic? Is it a divinatory art?
Mark Jones:
God, this is a million dollar question, isn’t it?
I don’t have a problem with people not believing in astrology, personally. It’s like someone believing or not believing in God. There’s all sorts of different gods people are believing or not believing in. There are all sorts of different astrologies people are believing or not believing in.
A lot of rational people see things in newspapers, and they think it’s baloney, and I would agree with them. It’s baloney. And I think there’s a lot of sensible, rational people that think that way, and I’m absolutely fine with them, and they will have nothing to do with us, and I’m absolutely fine with that, too.
Does astrology work? That is a totally different question. What it means–does anyone fully know? Is it a collective thing over millennia? Generations have built up meaning? Is it something actually imposed in the cosmos? Is it just some weird correspondence? Is it the Hermetic maxim, as above, so below?
Maybe that’s the closest I get in the general terms, philosophically, but does it work? Yes. I will argue passionately that it has value. Does it have an ultimate meta value? I don’t know. I’m not sure that’s even relevant past a certain point.
And if a whole bunch of people don’t believe in it, I don’t really care. I don’t buy a whole bunch of stuff myself. I don’t listen to a whole bunch of music, watch a whole bunch of movies. Who cares? That’s my take.
Steven Forrest:
I have never met anyone, in all the years I have been an astrologer who had two qualities simultaneously. One is that they disbelieved in astrology, and the second is that they actually knew anything about it. I’ve never seen those two qualities under one skin.
I agree with Mark that I don’t want to proselytize, and I’m not going to hand out astrology literature in shopping malls. If somebody doesn’t want to believe in astrology, that’s their own business, but the disbelief is dispelled by experience.
Johannes Kepler. I wish I could get this quote exactly right. I’ll get it pretty close.
He said that the unfailing observation of astrology working—that’s the paraphrase—”has compelled my unwilling belief.” I’ve always loved those words, “has compelled my unwilling belief.”
As a rational human being, he didn’t want to believe in astrology, but he simply investigated it and saw how incredibly powerfully it worked, and his belief was compelled by the facts, and I think anyone who looks at it with an open mind will quickly be pulled into the astrological worldview.
Mark Jones:
Good quote. Like Gauquelin’s study. They set out to disprove it, and they ended up finding statistical significance in it, but that’s not the most interesting angle of it, is it? Whether it rationally stacks up. It’s whether it emotionally and psychologically and spiritually makes sense to people in a lived context, and that’s why I personally—although I have respect for it—don’t have much interest in Babylonian astrology or the culture of the history of astrology.
I’m just personally, as a therapist and an evolutionary astrologer, looking for what works with people now in a lived sense to help liberate them in their lives, and it’s a really rich tool on that level. There’s just no denying it, so I couldn’t agree more.
Most things in life, most projections in life are dispelled by ignorance. Most hatreds in life—Black, Jew, whoever—comes from ignorance. It comes from hatred and fear, bred in ignorance. It’s the greatest source of human suffering in a way, isn’t it, ignorance?
Steven Forrest:
I’ve often found it interesting that astrology seems to create such a passionate, irrational reaction in certain kinds of people.
Mark Jones:
That is true.
Steven Forrest:
The big science kinds of folks. You can bring up the idea of Presbyterianism, or Rastafarianism, two belief systems for which there’s not a whole lot of empirical evidence—although God bless the Presbyterians and the Rastafarians. You can bring up those words to a big science kind of person. Generally, it’s like, live and let live.
Mark Jones:
That’s a really good point.
Steven Forrest:
You say “astrology,” and they hit the ceiling. This is shaky ground, maybe, but I think the crown jewel in Western science is astronomy, the great intellectual breakthrough of the Copernican revolution. The realization that the Earth orbited the sun was made the crown jewel, and we astrologers are, kind of, using it.
Mark Jones:
And, also those people have roots in it. Newton had roots in alchemy. Early science had its roots in alchemy and certain more imaginative Hermetic principles of a connected universe.
Science has moved on to such ridiculous levels that it disconnected itself from that seeming fantasy. Yet it has written its own end, hasn’t it? In quantum mechanics. They’re saying you can’t find everything, anyway, and you can fire a particle one way and a fire particle another other way, and they’re 10s of millions of miles apart, and when one changes, the other changes, too.
There’s no way they can communicate. There is an underlying field somewhere, or it’s different. So they wanted to simplify the world, and they wanted to reduce it and have their favorite toys. We’re seen as the freak show, aren’t we? Somehow, being into astrology implies you think the world’s magical or a fairy tale or something?
Steven Forrest:
You have a problem with that?
Mark Jones:
Well, why shouldn’t the world be magical? Don’t we all dig fairy tales? I certainly dig them, fancied most of the people in them, fell in love several times, as a small boy. Wood nymphs and princesses.
Steven Forrest:
Tinkerbell, wow.
Mark Jones:
Tinkerbell asks that because in the magic of the child and the innocence of the child, we want to say, “Yes, there is meaning.” And there’s something really profound in that, but there’s also something that people manipulate, and that’s why they fear it.
This is one of the reasons why people fear that kind of thing, because they fear that the innocence of the child has been taken on a ride by all these hucksters and shysters in the world, and they fear that astrology is trying to do the same thing. And I understand that fear because there’s a lot of people taking a lot of people for a ride, psychics saying, all the dead in the First World War, the Second World War, your son says this, and some of it’s BS.
It’s just messing with people, isn’t it? People project that onto astrology. This is another form of messing with them in that kind of way. Whereas, actually, it can be a tremendous gift to them. It’s for the likes of you and I to try and get that across sometimes, in our own–not proselytizing–but open kind of way.
Steven Forrest:
Yeah, I’m with you. It’s the great challenge.
Astrologers will often complain about the unfair treatment they get from the media or the general public, and one can make an excellent case for that, but I also like to get myself in trouble by observing that we create a lot of problems ourselves through essentially bad technique, bad practice. “Of course, I’m irresponsible. I’m a Sagittarius, and the astrologer told me I had to be irresponsible.”
Mark Jones:
The causality principle—”because so and so happened, this happened in my life”—I have a real philosophical and personal problem with.
I also have a problem with the therapeutic naivety of this profession sometimes. As a therapist, just the things one learns, the support one gets, the boundaries, the supervision. No one’s supervised here. No one’s given support. No one’s given a chance to learn and cut their teeth. It creates this culture of expectation.
Around this conference, there’s a whole bunch of people who expect the likes of me and Steven to just answer their problems or give some magical key or something, either personally or in a reading or whatever. And it’s not that we’re not there trying to offer something, but at the same time, it isn’t that.
No one can escape their personal responsibility to grow themselves. All another can do is mirror that back in the most supportive and loving way. There’s a lot of projection in these conferences. There’s a lot of expectation, and some people are giving out that false promise, in a sense, you know? If you’re going to have that projection at all from people, give it back to them in the best way you can find. Give it back to them with love. Otherwise, you’re playing a dangerous game—karmically, psychologically—with people’s expectations.
People are like kids inside, aren’t we? We’re all like kids, and we’re happy and we’re loving. It’s like a child and the child wants and expects there to be trust and rapport. And people get very cynical about that in the modern world, because they’re scared they’re being messed with in a way.
Steven Forrest:
Yeah, or even more frightening, eager to be messed with, eager to be lead around.
Mark Jones:
There’s an element of that in these places always, isn’t there?
Steven Forrest:
Yeah, that’s the danger, that’s the tightrope that we have to walk.
We can give effective, helpful guidance and make a real difference in people’s lives, help them make better decisions that lead them to be happier, more fulfilled, more self-actualized human beings. That is a power we actually do have, and I like to blow that trumpet. There’s a line I used in my first book, that is a kind of a summary of this: the map is not the territory. We can give them the map, but people are not going to be cured by astrology.
Mark Jones:
This, to me, is a really good point. General semantics: the map is not the territory, the menu is not the meal. The chart is a map, but then what can you do with a map?
You have a map, so you can offer that guidance with them with a map, but can you contextualize that map? How loving you are, how optimistic you are? The place you’re in, when you speak to that person, contextualizes that map.
I’ve spoken to people at conferences who have cried with relief because they’ve been given so many different opinions by different astrologers on the nature of that map that, when I just turned them and said, “What would it be like to just ignore all those idiots at the conference and just make up your own mind based on your intuition and your gut?” And they cried with relief.
The map is there, but astrologers shouldn’t be just guessers of the map. We’re trying to work out the territory. We can hold the map, and then listen to the person’s reality, and we can see what emerges—magically, if you like—in the space. I don’t like the word magic. I don’t know why I used it, but that’s the magic. The magic is co-creation with them.
It’s a dangerous thing, isn’t it, to always feel you have to say something about that map, something sensible all the time?
This lady was told she should work with kids, stop her job, and move house. There’s a huge discrimination issue in her chart, and I just said, “Just stop it all. What if you just stop giving your power to these people?” And the relief just got it through. There were tears. That’s the space in these places, the feeling that someone will give me an answer.
Steven Forrest:
As if there were one in the chart.
Mark Jones:
Yeah, some exact thing. You can just say that phrase, and they’ll be like, “Yay, yes. That’s all done now.”
Steven Forrest:
You get a little bit less of this nowadays, but for a long time, I’d go to conferences and people would put up Adolf Hitler’s chart. There were a variety of different lectures, but the bottom line boiled down to, “I could have told you this would be a bad guy, finding bad things in Hitler’s chart.”
Hitler’s chart, famously, on the surface of it, looks like a pretty nice guy, but I always like to point out if I’m willing to get shot at that Charlie Chaplin had a very similar chart to Adolf Hitler.
Mark Jones:
Nice little mustache comparison, too.
Steven Forrest:
Yeaht, that’s where the comparisons seem to end.
Mark Jones:
This is a fantastic point. Maybe this is the most important point of all of it. The chart is a symbolic map, but the consciousness of the individual, the evolutionary mindstream of the individual informs that map.
It’s nonsense, you could tell that about Hitler. Unless, you knew Hitler. If you sat there with him, maybe you could begin to tell.
My intuition opens up to the person when they invite me in a reading, or you have some context with it because it’s the living being that starts to emerge through the chart. But I think there’s a lot of things that get said with hindsight, don’t they, about charts?
Steven Forrest:
Oh, absolutely. Everybody’s brilliant in retrospect.
Mark Jones:
Tens of millions of one of the greatest cultural nations on earth bought into the guy like a rock star. That’s no easy feat. That’s no simple trick. They used tricks. Get this rhetoric. They used this bass tone–George Martin told Paul McCartney this in an interview recently in a documentary–they put this bass tone out that made everything really anxious on a stomach level, and then 20 seconds before Hitler came onstage, they stopped it.
So everyone’s starting to feel this wave of euphoria like, “I don’t feel so horrible anymore.”
Hitler that would hit the stage and speak that Mars/Venus Taurus, and just hold that energy in the projection. They orchestrated it like that. They would use these tricks to enhance it, but Germany is a really sensible nation. I was there recently, and I was seeing these pictures, all these beautiful kids and these work movements, these youth movements, and it was totally sincere.
They really believed in him, and, at this point, he wasn’t a mass murderer, exactly. It was budding. It was definitely a complex situation. I doubt many astrologers would necessarily get that just from a flat chart, like you say. I mean, it’s amazing what we can do with charts after the fact. I do it all the time, myself.
Steven Forrest:
We are so brilliant in retrospect.
Mark Jones:
I know. So, what’s the gamble with the person? The gamble with the person is: Why second guess when they probably know in their life, more than I know about them.
So when I’m with them, I ask, “What’s going on for you? How does it work for you?” I don’t go, “It probably works like this because of your Venus square Saturn.” I might do that if they’re struggling, and they want me to, but first, just ask them because you’ve got to trust that people know their own life.
Steven Forrest:
That’ll work. I think, looking at this rigorously, the idea that your nature is in your chart is completely wrong. We just pretty well described that with Hitler and Charlie Chaplin. End of story. So what is in the chart? I think the answer to that question is that the chart is essentially a matrix of questions that will come up over and over again in your life. Like any good question, there are a multitude of possible answers.
Taking that and going back to where you were a second ago about just asking the client. When a client is sitting with me, and they’re comfortable with me and willing to talk, I absolutely prefer to enter that way.
Because I have a fair amount of introversion in my character and some difficulty trusting people in my character—those are just personal statements about me—I’ve felt a lot of empathy for the client who comes in and they don’t know me, and I have this x-ray, and I’m going to be able to, in three minutes, talk about material that is profoundly threatening.
I emphatically never want to make the assumption that I have a right to assume that that person will trust me. The way I’ve done an end run around that problem has cost me a huge amount of money, you know, because it’s made my readings a lot longer. I try to cover the lowest possible response you could make to this chart and the questions right on up through the highest possible response.
As soon as the person volunteers to enter into dialogue with me, that’s what I prefer, but if a person wants to sit there all through the reading and I just lay out the choices that soul is facing, I’m okay with that. It’s not optimal.
Mark Jones:
That’s a decent effort. I’m not sure I’d do that. If they just sat there like that the whole time, I’d lay a few things out. Then I’d go, “Okay, maybe you should take some time to think about it. Give me a call if you need to.” What I really am getting from this, Steven, is that you take the counseling element of this process really seriously.
Steven Forrest:
It’s the essence of it.
Mark Jones:
That’s where I’m at, and I will stand by that a long, long time. I appreciate the fact that you’re prepared to go to that place with people. I’m a therapist a chunk of the time, too, so I’m used to being in a certain dialogue. And I approach that with the readings, and that’s going to work better for some than others, but, most of the time, that works for people.
I understand that you lead in occasionally, don’t you? You say, “It’s probably like this for you, isn’t it?” Just to encourage some dialogue. I’ll go there. I’ll just ask the person. With some people, they need to have some trust that you’ve got something useful to say, but I’m not interested in doing that for a long time, past that establishment of trust.
And that’s what I’ll work towards and try and hold. It’s a chance for a person to be true to something in themselves. To me, that’s always a higher order than the chart. The charts are a launchpad for that. I really get that you take giving readings to people seriously and the counseling arm of it, and I respect and admire that.
Steven Forrest:
Thank you. And I sense exactly the same thing from you. It seems that we’ll approach the process in marginally different ways. We’ve sensed some distinctions between our approaches in this conversation, but I’d contextualize that by saying that if we included 30 or 40 more astrologers at this conference in this conversation, we would probably find that you and I were standing next to each other.
Mark Jones:
I can see that. There’s folks out there—and this honestly scares me slightly—there’s folks out there that really think it’s cool to consciously try and dazzle people, to not have the client speak so that they can show them who they are without them ever interacting, and I find that whole approach concerning.
It’s manipulative and could become abusive, if it was taken too far in a certain context, of the person’s truth of who they really are. That kind of thing I want to, as often and as vociferously as possible, speak out against. That’s the danger of astrological malpractice. Whereas, the approach you’re taking where you listen, and you’re okay with where the person’s at, and you’re fundamentally validating of where they’re already at. I’m great with that.
Steven Forrest:
Good. Astrological malpractice, what a concept. There’s no shortage of it but no diagnosis of it. Astrology is funny that way. It’s the wild west. There are codes of ethics that various organizations have, but very few people are aware of them, and there’s no enforcement mechanism, really, at all.
Mark Jones:
It’s a strange gig, isn’t it?
Steven Forrest:
It’s totally strange. I like it. I laugh at myself some because I’ve worked with the ISAR or the International Society for Astrological Research. I had a pretty basic role in terms of framing their ethics code when they decided it was time to write one, and I sort of look forward to a day when there is some mechanism for weeding out the ones who are doing damage, yet I’m also glad I’m 62, and I’ll be dead before that happens.
Mark Jones:
It’s nice to be in that freedom. This void of course moon thing. I learned I am one, natally, and I am one by progression right now, which is the same as you, isn’t it? You’re in one natally and by progression right now.
Steven Forrest:
Yeah.
Mark Jones:
Natally and progression. All my life I’ve lived that. It’s also Mars on the south node of Uranus. Just the freedom to be in that place where different forms interpenetrate on me, I love that. Therapy and astrology. What can they say to each other? Hypnotherapy and astrology and therapy, what can they say to each other? I love it.
Steven Forrest:
Me too.
Mark Jones:
Rock’n’roll, isn’t it?
Steven Forrest:
Absolutely. Improvisation. What an astonishing thought that after, who knows how many centuries you know, the scholars will say 2100 years, since the Hellenistic revolution in astrology. I suspect it’s a lot longer than that, personally. But after all these centuries and millennia, we’re still making it up as we go along. I think that’s wonderful.
Mark Jones:
There’s an openness. These are fundamental archetypal principles we’re teaching, and then just the openness. What can be brought to that? What can that do now? How can I see that now? I like that.
Steven Forrest:
We start to get it halfway straightened out, and then God throws a curveball in the whole mix. Okay, here’s Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Eris, Quaoar…
Mark Jones:
Spirit is just on a higher level than astrology, isn’t it? That’s just, if I really go with my heart: astrology is useful, but see it in its context. It’s not the same as an encounter with the truth of who you really are. It could, hopefully, be a start point or something. Turn a lot of people on, but…
Steven Forrest:
Yeah, in the food chain, it’s always a little south of consciousness, though.
Mark Jones:
Yeah, exactly. Love, awakening, wisdom. These things rule.
Tony Howard:
Let’s finish up with the Inside the Actor’s Studio question for astrologers. It’s a favorite of a lot of people: Fate or free-will?
Mark Jones:
On some level, non-dualistically, they’re both the same thing. If you accept that there’s a unifying field and it’s divinity, if you then surrender to that field, then everything that’s meant to happen happened. Everything that does happen is what was meant to happen. That becomes a level where fate and free-will dissolve.
Prior to that level, it’s all to do with the perspective the consciousness needs to feel in a way, isn’t it? They’re both operating in a way, aren’t they?
There are perceived limitations in the relative universe. I wasn’t born in America, so I can’t become the president, but it’s all the karmic perfection of who you are given the ultimate chance to grow. And on some level that surrenders. Fate and free-will are the same thing because, on a deeper inner level, you want the perfect opportunity to learn and grow and be and evolve and love and be alive, to fuse together at the most important level.
Outside of that, it depends what kind of day you’re having, doesn’t it? God, why do you abuse me so?
Steven Forrest:
[God voice] It’s free will.”
Mark Jones:
Yeah, that sadistic m***.
Steven Forrest:
[God voice] I felt like it, my son.
Mark Jones:
But, you know, that’s us. That’s our perspective to it, and it shifts when you really surrender, doesn’t it? It shifts and they, sort of, at the most important times become the same thing, I would argue. Although it’s kind of hard to do that argument full justice.
Steven Forrest:
Fate and free-will are—at a philosophical and ultimate level—from my point of view, imponderables.
Mark speaks confidently about the two being really ultimately the same, different sides of the same coin. That, maybe, is true. I don’t know. What I feel very confident of, though, is that the word “fate” is grossly overused in modern astrological practice.
I take a radical position here. I’ve noticed this has taken a lot of people aback, and it’s actually seemingly created evidence of offense in some other astrologers. I absolutely and totally reject the notion of fate as something that can be perceived in the chart. There is absolutely no fate at all observable within the astrological context, and when astrologers use that word that way, they’re doing a disservice to their clients.
My challenge to them is that they will always claim fate retrospectively, with the cheap trick of, “I could have told you that. See, this had to happen because this configuration was unfolding.” They’re 100% accurate as Monday morning quarterbacks, but I’ve never once seen an astrologer who could consistently predict the future in a fatalistic way.
Mark Jones:
It’s dangerous. It’s a dangerous game. Karmically dangerous. It’s dangerous to people. I couldn’t agree more, and this thing about fate, the way fate is seen as in, “This happened to me because Saturn is transiting my blah-blah, and that’s why my relationship fell apart.” Well, no, no, really, no. Your relationship fell apart because of what unfolded between two people who maybe used to love each other or don’t now.
Or, you lost your job because you didn’t get up in time five days on the trot, and they sacked you.
Don’t disown personal power to the context of the chart or fate or the stars. That’s the ultimate fantasy, and you can see it.
Folks are wandering around the conference, and they must want it to be that way. No, there’s total personal power. From who you really are inside, life manifests around you, in truth. The charts are the symbolic expression of that on some level, but that kind of thing. Phooey to it. You create that kind of experience from who you are inside.
You manifest the people you know in your life because of who you are. People have these people treat them terribly, and they stay with them because they have some deep shameful part inside themselves that stays with them, you know? That’s not fate. No, that’s just psychology.
Steven Forrest:
Psychology and choice.
Mark Jones:
Yeah, exactly the choice.
Steven Forrest:
There’s the menu of your fate in the sense that you have this astrological series of options. Then you know the universe says, “What are you having?” You make your choice.
Mark Jones:
Your choice is so important. I’m bang with that. Choice is central, central to human relationships, central to human meaning. We’re all choosing stuff all the time, consciously and unconsciously, whether we know it or not, all from the way we relate to ourselves.
Steven Forrest:
Saturn conjunct Venus in the natal chart, just for one concrete example: unlucky in love, lonely all the time. Those are on the menu. Profoundly committed, capable of keeping vows. That’s on the menu, too.
Mark Jones:
I’m a Venus Capricorn. I’m supposed to be this deeply repressed guy that never gets with anyone—actually, I’ve had my moments, but I’ve been with the same person for years and years, deeply committed, when I really know someone, when I really care about someone, intensely loyal.
It all depends on where it’s contextualized, where it’s held in the overall field of the chart, the symbols, the understanding, but also the consciousness of the individual, and how that archetype is expressed through them. In my teenage years, I used to wear black all the time and avoid human contact and read Sartre. I was a pretentious kind of a******, really.
I took things pretty seriously though, man. I was pretty grief-stricken about life, you know? But I got through it, and you do. I had my suicidal crisis in my teens, and I got through it. The charts have all these potentialities, and they grow depending on what the person’s allowed in themselves, and fate just becomes another way—like a crappy childhood—to justify all the s*** that happens to you, you know? There is no chance there is an opportunity to grow and evolve, to surrender this stuff and change and be what you could really be. I’m always interested in that.
Steven Forrest:
Absolutely. Our responsibility as astrologers is to point somebody at the higher ground. Every time.
Mark Jones:
The choice thing is central to that, isn’t it? Are some things just meant to happen? It seems that way from our relative experience, but is everything a manifestation of who you really are and your choices on a conscious and unconscious level? Yes. That’s the paradox, isn’t it?
Tony Howard:
Well, thanks, guys for taking time out to talk with us and talk with our viewers. I’m sure they’re all just as grateful as I am to be a fly on the wall here and listen to this conversation among two great thinkers in astrology. Thank you.
Be sure to check out all the great talks from Mark and Steven on this website including courses and webinars.
